Jim Creech watched from the steps of his prison hut as the German commandant's cat approached. He made sure no guards were looking, reached down and grabbed it.

Fierce hunger made him see the cat as food, not a pet. He brought it inside, put it in a 5-gallon metal bucket and, to muffle any purrs or meows that might draw the Germans' attention, covered the bucket with a blanket from his straw mattress bunk.

After Jim's five hut mates returned for the night, and Perleberg's guards had closed the window shutters and locked the door, Jim strangled the cat. Prisoners weren't allowed to have a knife, so he used a stone-sharpened lid from a can to do the cutting.

Soon he and his pals would have an unheard-of treat: meat. They talked excitedly about it.

Jim harked back to his experience as an apprentice butcher at the grocery store in his North Carolina hometown. He dressed the cat as he had once dressed rabbits and squirrels, cut it into pieces and dropped them in an aluminum pitcher with water.

He put the head, fur, skin, paws and tail in the bucket, which was all the men had for a toilet.

The hut had a potbelly stove but never any fuel that the Germans would allow. As Jim prepared the cat, the others broke up slats from underneath the mattresses on their bunks. One man had broken through the floor and ripped out some of the under-structure.

Using the wood and a few chunks of coal they'd picked up on a work detail along railroad tracks, the prisoners started a fire in the stove late in the evening. The guards were outside the compound, unlikely to detect this unusual and forbidden activity.

The water boiled, cooking the cat. For seasoning, the men added salt from the camp kitchen and barley that one man had snatched from a bag that had been unloaded from a barge. He had stuffed a few handfuls down his pants, which were tied with shoestrings around the ankles -- a trick prisoners used to conceal food they had swiped.

About 1 in the morning, the six starving prisoners sat down together and feasted on the animal. Pretending it was chicken or turkey, they ate every morsel and as much as they could pick off the bones.

For them, it was a gourmet meal. Normally, each man got a piece of moldy bread made of equal parts of sawdust, flour and chestnut hulls. It came with marmalade or jelly and a cup of ersatz coffee, made from pinto beans, mottled kidney beans. That was breakfast.

The bread came in loaves, each weighing about 4 pounds. On a good day, six men shared a loaf; on other days, as many as a dozen did.

If 10 men had to divide a loaf, one man wasn't going to let another get a bigger piece than his own. Slicing the loaf with a can lid, they balanced the pieces on a scale, a stick, to make sure they were equal, and did that until they had created 10 piles. All the men had to agree that each pile had the same amount of bread.

The second and final meal of the day came in the afternoon. The Germans came into the hut with a 5-gallon milk can containing watery turnip soup made from turnips grown for animal feed. They'd give each man a ladle-full in an enamel pan. Sometimes if the captives were lucky, they got potato soup.

Because they got so little, prisoners constantly thought about food and talked about it. Someone would describe in detail the making of a hamburger steak, and the aroma of meat and onions frying in the pan, as others gathered around him and drooled.

A POW would take an hour telling his buddies about the wonders of bologna. Jim secretly kept a journal, which he hid in his sewing machine, and one day wrote a single word wistfully: "bologna."

Sometimes he talked about the Brass Rail steak sandwiches that his Allentown buddy Earl Schnabel had told him about and that he enjoyed when he visited Joyce Soprano before shipping out. But he could never finish his description. Someone, such as a guard looking to organize a work detail, always interrupted him.

Getting rid of evidence

Several hours after they had gorged themselves, Jim and his hut mates awoke at dawn to the noise of the guard opening the shutters and unlocking the door. It was just like every other morning, except this time they had a secret mission: to dispose of the cat's remains.

Jim had the duty of dumping the 5-gallon bucket the men used for waste. He carried it to the wash house and, making sure no guards saw him, emptied it into the concrete trough that served as a latrine.

The trough drained into an underground sewer pipe, 6 inches in diameter, that went outside the compound and connected to Perleberg's sewage system. Jim dumped water into the trough until he could no longer see any of the cat's head, skin, tail or paws, which were all in one piece, and the bones.

Later, from his sewing room window, he saw the commandant walking around the compound and outside it as if he were looking for something. Jim knew it must be the cat.

The next day, as rumors raced around the camp, word reached Jim and his hut mates that the commandant said whoever was responsible would be shot.

That threat came with another dark omen: Something had caused the sewage to back up into the latrine, and the commandant had called in a plumber.